You can get anything you want...

[Paducah Home Theater]

... at Alice's restaurant.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2015/08/26/things-about-arlo-guthrie-alice-restaurant-its-anniversary/n9KOboD8L9X32UownPPFtK/story.html

50th anniversary!

[oldtimer]

From the roof top

Shout it out

Baby I'm ready to go

[minermark]

I believe my Mr Crow has this covered.

 

[Paducah Home Theater]

[Paducah Home Theater]

PBS concert tonight.  

 

http://www.gratefulweb.com/articles/pbs-premieres-alices-restaurant-50th-anniversary-concert-arlo-guthrie-thanksgiving-day-2015

[The History Kid]

Ahhh...love this song.

I used it in my AERA Research Paper actually:

 

The same year as Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” was released, folk singer Arlo Guthrie released “Alice’s Restaurant.” The twenty-five minute song’s satire about the American military draft, is setup by various forms of stories leading to the final point.

They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. […] And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. […] I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies.

The satirical approach that Guthrie portrays is of a draft board in New York. Guthrie used satire to describe the oddity of the procedures of the draft itself. Guthrie goes on in the song to indicate that he “may not be moral enough to join the army.” The line is said tongue in cheek, poking fun that one had to have a certain set of moral standards to join an army that would be sent to kill innocent civilians.

I mean I'm sittin’ here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug.

Guthrie expresses his outrage over the practice of the draft board eventually towards the end of the song, by poking fun at the song in general. He says that if anyone should ever find themselves in a similar situation they should sing a bar of the song and walk out, hopefully being deemed as unfit or too insane to join the army. It was seen as a way to flunk the physical and avoid being drafted. The song itself was revealed to be a simple staple to the overall point of the track itself, and the track in its entirety is simply a story made up and presented by Guthrie. He muses that “the army may think it’s a movement”, and goes on to call it the “Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement”, resonating with the bloodshed in Vietnam.

Lines from one of the sequences in Guthrie, Arlo. Alice’s Resturant. Reprise Records RS-6267. 1967.

A line from the near end of the song Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie.

In case anyone is interested in reading the full article that I wrote?

Edited November 26, 2015 by IbizaFlame

[ZEUS121996]

Interesting read IBIZ.

Two of my former bosses were on opposite sides of the war, both of them now 69 years old. Tom was at the Kent State protest when the shootings took place, John was a  sergeant in the RECON unit. He got out when his best friend's parents asked that he fly the body home.

Your work seems to reflect the 2 polar opposites that my friends and country were defined by

 

Mark

[The History Kid]

Thanks for that feedback, Mark.

Yeah, Vietnam is within my concentration at school, so I get to get my hands dirty on the subject a bit. Vietnam was definitely a case where the tides were polarized (not unlike today, although there seems to be more armchair debaters than the 60s).

On another note, this project made me lose almost all of my respect for John Lennon. What I turned up on the man seriously made me just look at him with so much distain.

[BigStewMan]

Thanks for that feedback, Mark.

Yeah, Vietnam is within my concentration at school, so I get to get my hands dirty on the subject a bit. Vietnam was definitely a case where the tides were polarized (not unlike today, although there seems to be more armchair debaters than the 60s).

On another note, this project made me lose almost all of my respect for John Lennon. What I turned up on the man seriously made me just look at him with so much distain.

thanks for sharing the article--enjoyed it.

as for Lennon, a former assistant of his went public saying that Lennon became embarrassed by his former radical views and actually liked President Reagan.  

Not sure what your age is now; but, i guarantee you won’t be the same man 25 years from now. 

[babadono]

Must have been President Elect Reagan

https://www.google.com/search?q=john+lennon+death&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Ronald_Reagan

[The History Kid]

Thanks for that feedback, Mark.

Yeah, Vietnam is within my concentration at school, so I get to get my hands dirty on the subject a bit. Vietnam was definitely a case where the tides were polarized (not unlike today, although there seems to be more armchair debaters than the 60s).

On another note, this project made me lose almost all of my respect for John Lennon. What I turned up on the man seriously made me just look at him with so much distain.

thanks for sharing the article--enjoyed it.

as for Lennon, a former assistant of his went public saying that Lennon became embarrassed by his former radical views and actually liked President Reagan.

Not sure what your age is now; but, i guarantee you won’t be the same man 25 years from now.

I encourage you to read the biography cited. Wiener wrote several books on Lennon and is considered an authority.

[BigStewMan]

Must have been President Elect Reagan

https://www.google.com/search?q=john+lennon+death&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Ronald_Reagan

Well, he wasn’t president at the time that John allegedly voiced support.  I just referred

to Reagan as President Reagan out of habit. Personally, i was never a Lennon fan. My earlier post was more about how we change...i look back now on things that i once believed and shake my head--i don’t think i’m much different than others. 

 

I don’t know the credibility of this Fred guy; but, this was in the Los Angeles Times:

 

Fred Seaman, who was Lennon's personal assistant from 1979 until the singer's assassination in 1980, claims the former Beatle and anti-war activist favored Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter and would have voted for the Gipper if he could have.

"John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on Jimmy Carter," Seaman told Seth Swirsky, who is making a film about the Fab Four.

Seaman said the guitarist "met Reagan back, I think, in the '70s at some sporting event."

"Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young [peace] demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that," Seaman told Swirsky in excerpts published in the Toronto Sun. "He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me."